Pardot Winter’22 Release: Top 10 Features

Currently, the Winter’22 release is available under the pre-release program. On the and 27th of August, Sandboxes will be upgraded, as a result, your organization will get the look and feel of the Winter’22 release. In case you have not read the entire 546 pages of Salesforce Winter’22 release notes, check out the Winter’22 release quick summary written by me.

I combed through the release notes and highlighted the most exciting, interesting, and useful Pardot features. To kick things off, here is my take on the coolest Pardot features from the Winter’22 release.

1. Send Slack Notifications to Pardot Users with Completion Actions (Beta):- Speed up your pipeline with a completion action that notifies your team in Slack when prospects interact with your marketing assets. Automatically send promising new leads to your Sales team, and share important prospect activity data with your Marketing team.
2. Build Landing Pages Faster with Drag-And-Drop Editor:- If you’re using the Pardot Lightning App, you can now build landing pages inside the Lightning Experience. After you enable the feature, users can create a landing page record in a couple of clicks. Plus, stay on brand by encouraging users to start from saved templates and to select approved images from your Salesforce CMS repository.
   1. The landing page builder becomes available when you enable the new Pardot content experience and Salesforce CMS integration.
   2. After setup, users can create landing page records, design landing pages, and publish them right from the Pardot Lightning App. Salesforce Files aren’t supported in the builder, so we encourage you to follow the setup steps to integrate with Salesforce CMS.
3. Explore Einstein Key Accounts on List Views (Generally Available):- Einstein Key Account Identification is now generally available. This handy tool helps you prioritize your account-based marketing tactics by assigning a tier ranking and providing insights, which show characteristics that an account has in common with other successful accounts. The Einstein tier and insights appear on its record, and you can add the tier field to list views for ranking data at a glance.
   1. Rankings are predicted by the model and assigned a tier (1), such as A, B, C, or D, where A is the most likely to convert within 6 months. An uplift value (2) is calculated by comparing the conversion likelihood between an account from the given tier and a randomly selected one.
   2. The training period for the Einstein model is up to 72 hours, and during that time no insights appear. When an insight is available for a given account, the data appears automatically.
4. Take Your Automations Further with Pardot Extensibility Enhancements:- Now you can improve your Pardot automations with valuable external prospect data from your third-party apps. For each third-party app you use to collect prospect data, set up a Marketing App Extension. Then, add each activity type you want to capture. For example, capture when a prospect attends a webinar through your third-party webinar service and use that data in any of your Pardot automations or Engagement Studio programs. You can also view external activity data on individual prospect records.
5. Create Custom Components for the Email Content Builder:- You can now create custom email components to use in Pardot’s drag-and-drop builder. Custom components help marketers and managers create more engaging email content for their customers.
   1. To configure a custom component to use in the Pardot email experience, define the metadata in <component>.js-meta.xml. Define a lightning__StaticEmail target and set <isExposed> to true.
      

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
      <LightningComponentBundle xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
      <apiVersion>53.0</apiVersion>
      <isExposed>true</isExposed>
      <targets>
      <target>lightning__AppPage</target>
      <target>lightningStatic__Email</target>
      <target>lightning__HomePage</target>
      </targets>
      </LightningComponentBundle>

6. Enjoy Improved Prospect Mailability Insights (Generally Available):- This feature, now generally available, includes some improvements since the last release. All prospect records include a mailability section so marketers can see what type of emails a prospect can receive and what their bounce status is. Prospect mailability and opt-in status is easily updated via automation rules, prospect imports, and Engagement Studio programs. Plus, the Do Not Email field and the Opt Out field on prospects records are no longer connected, so they can’t override each other.
7. Customize Prospect Unsubscribe and Resubscribe Page Content: – Your marketing team can now control all the messaging that appears on Pardot unsubscribe and resubscribe pages. Customizable fields now include the unsubscribe prompt, plus button text and confirmation messages for the unsubscribe and resubscribe pages.
8. View IP Address for Prospect Activities in Pardot: – To better understand your engagement data, you can view the IP address associated with most prospect activities on prospect records in Pardot. You can use this additional insight to create more effective visitor activity filters. For example, if you notice a lot of test clicks coming from a single IP, you can filter out that activity based on the IP.
9. Push Emails from Lightning Experience into Engagement Programs: – When you create emails in the drag-and-drop editor in Lightning Experience, you can now save them for use in Engagement Studio. Create your email content and activate it for use in automations.
   1. Enable the email experience on the Content Setup page in Marketing Setup. The next time a user with the appropriate permission creates or opens an email content record, Activate for Automation appears in the action menu.
10. New and Updated Pardot User Permissions: – As part of Pardot’s mailability improvements, new user permissions are available: Update Do Not Email field, Reset hard bounce count, and Reset soft bounce count. The user permission Toggle Opt In Status is now Update Opted Out field. Any users that previously had the Toggle Opt In Status permission now have the Update Opted Out field permission.

Additional enhancements worth noting!

1. See When and How Segmentation Prospect Lists Were Updated: – To give marketing users more insight on their prospect lists, the segmentation list view in Pardot now includes two new columns: Updated At and Updated By. These columns show the date and time the list was last updated, and which user made the update. Marketers can filter the list view based on column data.
2. Unarchived Dynamic Lists Retain Prospects: – When you unarchive a dynamic list, the list retains the prospects that were on it when it was archived. Then the list rules are rerun to look for matching prospects. The prospect count can change after the rules are rerun, so we recommend that you wait to receive a confirmation email that the list is restored before you send to it.
3. Bring Your Own Encryption Keys to Pardot: – Bring and manage your own encryption keys to protect your Pardot data. Use Bring Your Own Key for Encryption at Rest to add a layer of security to your Pardot account, and to quickly destroy your data in a compliance emergency.

Formative Assessment:

I want to hear from you!  

What are your favorite Winter’22 release note gems? You can download release notes in HTML format!, for PDF files.

Let me know by Tweeting me at @automationchamp, or find me on LinkedIn.